Love your enemy week

Dirk Willems saves his pursuer in this etching from the 1685 edition of Martyrs Mirror.

Each year in May, Anabaptists commemorate the death of Dirk Willems, who was burned at the stake in 1569. His story is both inspiring and horrifying. Here’s the Mennonite Quarterly Review’s narrative:

Dirk was caught, tried and convicted as an Anabaptist in those later years of harsh Spanish rule under the Duke of Alva in The Netherlands. He escaped from a residential palace turned into a prison by letting himself out of a window with a rope made of knotted rags, dropping onto the ice that covered the castle moat. Seeing him escape, a palace guard pursued him as he fled. Dirk crossed the thin ice of a pond, the “Hondegat,” safely. His own weight had been reduced by short prison rations, but the heavier pursuer broke through. Hearing the guard’s cries for help, Dirk turned back and rescued him. The less-than-grateful guard then seized Dirk and led him back to captivity. This time the authorities threw him into a more secure prison, a small, heavily barred room at the top of a very tall church tower, above the bell, where he was probably locked into the wooden leg stocks that remain in place today. Soon he was led out to be burned to death.

Many progressive evangelicals of the 1970s were–and still are today–Mennonite or Brethren descendents of Anabaptist martyrs like Willems who pursued peace and love for enemies.

In 1973 the Washington Post suggested that the evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." In the end, it did not. While progressive evangelicals shaped the culture and living habits of millions, it did not take shape electorally in the way that the Moral Majority did. This first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, to be published in September 2012 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, explains why.